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The Amoeba Interaction Network: Initial Results

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University of Canterbury

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Doctoral

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The interaction network has been proposed as a way of representing all processing (process execution and message passing) that is the direct result of a single user input to any type of computer system. The interaction network is particularly well suited for representing interactive processing in distributed systems. The first interaction network monitor was developed for the SunOS operating system. Some interesting results were obtained using the monitor, but by the time it was completed the Sun 3 hardware and SunOS 4.0 software were basically obsolete.

A second interaction network monitor has been developed for the Amoeba distributed operating system. Amoeba was seen as a better development environment than SunOS for two main reasons. Firstly, Amoeba was designed from scratch as a distributed operating system. Secondly, the source code of Amoeba is readily available.

The main aim of this report is to document initial experiences with the Amoeba interaction network monitor. It begins with a very brief review of the interaction network concept, before describing the current implementation of the Amoeba interaction network monitor. Then some early experiences with use of the monitor are reported. The interaction networks presented do not constitute a comprehensive study of Amoeba performance, but do provide some interesting insights into the operation of Amoeba as well as showing the promise of the interaction network approach.